Read along with Close Readings
Selected by London Review of Books
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription in which longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. Subscribe here for £4.99 a month/£49.99 a year, and read along with the four new series for 2025 by buying the featured books from the London Review Bookshop, listed below. New titles will be added two weeks ahead of the release of the relevant episode.
Conversations in Philosophy: Jonathan Rée and James Wood challenge a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of philosophy and literature.
Fiction and the Fantastic: Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder.
Love and Death: Mark Ford and Seamus Perry explore the oscillating power of outrage and grief, bitterness and consolation, in elegies from the Renaissance to the present day.
Novel Approaches: Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels, looking in particular at the roles played by money and property.
From the publisher:
A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society, the Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is edited with an introduction and notes by Robert…
From the publisher:
Central essays by Feuerbach, advancing his humanist and atheist thoughtLudwig Feuerbach’s departure from the traditional philosophy of Hegel opened a door for generations of radical philosophical thinkers, foremost among them the…
From the publisher:
'Full of the energies of discord - sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion and vanity' Margaret DrabbleJane Austen's profound, ambiguous third novel is the story of Fanny Price, who is accustomed to being the poor relation…
From the publisher:
Edited by John LeonardThe poems of John Milton (1608-74) have inspired readers for generations and the selection in this new edition spans his entire career, from his earliest works to the magnificent epics of his later life. The…
From the publisher:
Starting in 1999 with the publication of The Definitive Annotated Alice, the Norton and Liveright annotated books have become the leading series of classic, illustrated works in the English language. The long-anticipated publication of The…
From the publisher:
Kierkegaard's infamous and hugely influential philosophical work on faith, choice and sacrificeIn Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, expounds his personal view of religion through the scene in…
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